Dagger Magic

He was half-minded to use his enforced withdrawal as an excuse to withdraw entirely, and make good his escape. What prevented him was the promise of a share in the sub's cargo. He had seen the crates, and knew what Dorje had said they contained. If even half the volume of each really was diamonds, such a prize was not lightly to be dismissed. And then there was the matter of the manuscripts….

After a moment's further deliberation, he set his lantern on the slimy floor of the conning tower and stationed himself at the forward railing, well back from the hatch, and settled in to wait and see what would develop.

At first all was silence. The eerie light of the flares began to get on his nerves. As the minutes ticked away, however, the hush became pregnant with eerie expectancy, like the prelude to a storm. Very occasionally, Raeburn became aware of a whisper of chanting coming from within.

Then all at once he became aware of a deep-toned rumbling that seemed to be travelling up from the sea-floor. As it grew louder, the light of the electric lantern began to flicker, as if something were interfering with the power in the batteries.

The atmospheric pressure inside the cavern was changing. Raeburn could almost feel the barometer dropping. His eardrums began to throb, filling his head with a dull tattoo like distant artillery fire. He pressed his palms to his temples, then gave an involuntary start as something whisked past him.

He wheeled instinctively toward the open hatch. There was nothing to be seen. Another passing flit raised the hackles on the back of his neck. Then suddenly the surrounding air was full of invisible movement.

Like water disappearing down a drain, the phantoms were sucked down through the hatchway into the belly of the ship, and Raeburn was assailed by a sudden, fleeting impression of voices shrieking in protest somewhere above and beyond the registers of normal sound.

The screams drained away like leaves caught in a whirlpool. Then the whirlpool turned itself suddenly upside down, its concentric forces rising up out of the depths of the sub in a cone of elemental power.

Like the tail of an inverted cyclone, the storm of power lashed out at the cavern's roof. There was a sonorous boom, like the report of a mortar. Looking up sharply, Raeburn saw a sudden rift appear in the cavern's roof. Out of that rift descended the first crackling rain of unearthly energies.

Chapter Thirty

THE full moon was well up in the sky by the time the Lady Gregory cleared the northernmost tip of Horn Head. Adam stood alone in the bow of the big cabin cruiser, dark eyes narrowed to mere slits as he scanned the serrated line of the shore. He had exchanged his tweed jacket for a waxed one, and he pulled the corduroy collar closer against the sea-spray as the Lady Gregory forged on, skirting the unbroken chain of sea-cliffs that stood frowning in the moonlight like the ramparts of some huge, forbidding fortress. So far, they had spotted no sign of their quarry.

But they were getting close. In the last half hour, all of them had begun to detect the first telltale signs that dark forces were building in this vicinity. Those emanations were growing with each passing minute - all the proof any of them needed that time was running short, and not in their favor.

The sound of soft footfalls and the rustle of a waxed jacket heralded McLeod coming up from the stern to join Adam. The inspector was carrying a pair of infrared binoculars, one of two supplied by Magnus's undercover contact. Another of Magnus's contacts had ensured that they were not detained at any of the border checkpoints coming out of Londonderry - which was just as well, because the cache by then secured in the back of the Hi-Ace van had included numerous tightly controlled items, the most innocuous of which were the half-dozen spare ammo clips for the Browning Hi-Power automatics that both McLeod and Magnus now were carrying. His nerves raw-alert, Adam reflected grimly that it was going to take something more than conventional firepower to stop whatever dark work their adversaries had in progress - but they must be prepared for conventional resistance as well.

McLeod trained the binoculars on the shore, scanned long and intently, then muttered, "Nothing!" in manifest frustration. "Damn it, we can all but smell them! If we don't find them soon, there's going to be hell to pay."

While his two superiors were keeping a lookout from the deck, Peregrine was up in the pilothouse with Aoife's nephew, Eamonn, owner and operator of the Lady Gregory. While Eamonn skillfully piloted the Lady G around and through the maze of offshore rocks and shoals, keeping an eye on his depth-sounder, Peregrine was using the second pair of night-binoculars in an attempt to get a high-angle view of the passing landscape. So far he had seen nothing worth mentioning.

"What exactly are you looking for?" Eamonn asked.